Steady as she goes.

livejournal

While I hadn’t *completely* forgotten that I had a LiveJournal from years ago, I did remember that I hadn’t written in it for ages. I was going to delete it wholesale, but then I went through some old posts and realised that my blogging days started in the early 2000s.

May 2010 I started this blog, Not Travelling At Speed. For some reason I didn’t feel like I wanted to publish my Why I Ride post to my LiveJournal – I think because I’d locked down most of my posts because they felt private. I wrote the way I do here, but I still felt like I wasn’t ready for prime time. Why I Ride was the first thing I’d written that I didn’t want to hide.

But having read through some of them, I decided to transfer them to Not Travelling. It isn’t all of my posts, just some of them, but the ones that I’ve transferred made me smile and feel nostalgic.

For context: in Feb 2002 I started at university, after having worked in a public library for about three years. Around August 2002 I started working at a Beaconsfield independent video store called Starland Video. That’s about when my blogging started.

The beginnings of the renovations was gathering up the courage to look at the old patch of damp in the bedroom up near the cornice.

I brushed off the old bits of bubbled paint, and was pressing my fingertips into the drylining, trying to see if the damp had wrecked the drylining. It all looked not that bad – the paint had been buggered, but the damp didn’t appear to have ruined the drylining boards. I kept knocking my hand around, tapping the walls to see if there were any changes in sound and I tapped along the cornice. Tap, tap, tap, thock.

My knuckles sank into the cornice. Excellent. There is a 5 centimetre in diameter patch of cornice that consisted solely of the paint that had covered it. There is an awful amount of crud behind the wall, so I fear that the damp was not fixed, but merely dried out at some point. Whatever caused the damp was probably fixed (I expect it was probably drainpipes), but the damage remained.

So the second joy of renovations is to call the strata management company and describe the problem and have them agree that it sounds structural and therefore part of the strata company’s responsibility!